Straight As Straight Can Be

by Ann Davie

Approximately 830 words

Inside me, there isn't a temptress wrapped in satin, or some savvy, shoulder-padded businesswoman. My hidden person isn't perfectly proportioned with a wicked sense of humor and a penchant for femme-fatale machinations. The other me is someone quite like me. It's not a matter of how she is different to me, but rather when she is different to me.

Time passed outside my grandparents' house but never crossed its threshold. It was in the tidy, white house that I first met the one living inside me. I felt her appear years ago, and she grew inside me, along with the child everyone else knew.

I caught glimpses of her from the beveled mirrors in one of the bedrooms, peacock plumes tucked behind for good luck. I felt her comfort in the old quilt, pieced from dresses worn out long ago. I breathed her in with the soft scent of sheets washed in the old crank tub and hung out to dry in the garden. I knew she hid, at times, in the basement along with the neatly stored coffee tins, salvaged giftwrap, and rusty nails and washers sorted in old jars.

Her impish grin and pixie eyes held recollections of playing in the alley, spinning a hoop down the brick paved road, or clattering down the lane in a pair of old steel roller skates. The pockets of her smock would be heavy with treasures - shiny stones collected after the tar and gravel trucks had passed down the main road, bottle caps, and bits and pieces salvaged from the ashcan in the back.

She found thousands of games to play in the garden framed by the whitewashed fence. Daisies, Dahlias, Morning Glories, Asters, Cosmos and Snapdragons. They all became fast friends every spring. Summer brought relief in the dappled shade and once in a great while with tall cool glasses of lemonade. Come autumn, the red carpet of maple leaves were sternly raked by her brothers into piles, made perfect for jumping and rolling. Winter laid a blanket, too cold for a pair of bare knees. She watched as her father, bundled in scarves and mittens, cleared a ragged path to the outhouse.

She loved her mother more than anything else in her world and grab her legs as she stood in front of the sink peeling carrots and potatoes. She could close her eyes and still saw every flower on the apron trimmed with ric-rac. The painted tins of flour and sugar held magic that only she could perform. Her mother taught without words; my friend learned how to tell when done was done. She practiced with scraps of dough and fabric how to be a woman. But most of all, her mother allowed her the chance to be a child, something her older brothers never knew.

Visits to my grandparents' house grew fewer and fewer. However, my friend would find places to appear elsewhere. In the jaunty tune of some forgotten piece of jazz, she danced in time - from another time - with the muted trumpet and loosely tuned piano. She'd sound in the hallow footsteps in some long empty room with dust as thick as dirt. I'd find her peering behind a pair of lace curtains trimming a lone window in an old apartment block. And I caught her giggling in the churchyard with a flock of schoolgirls, shy eyes smiling from under a wide-brimmed Easter hat held with a white-gloved hand.

As I grew up, so did my friend. I felt her hopeful confidence as she strode with me down the LaSalle Street canyons in Chicago, both off to a first job. Our heels clicked across the marble floor of an impressive office building foyer, both falling in love with the hushed beauty of buildings with grace and substance.

I shared her excitement, which sometimes bordered on terror, as we walked under the "EL" tracks, rumbling with an approaching train. And when I ordered my lunch at the Dill Pickle Deli, I imagined her sitting at the lunch counter, laughing with her work mates. I could see her dark brown hair, straight as straight could be. She wished, like I did, that curls could stay. How nice they would look dipping sweetly from under her hat and against her pale cheek.

And when I moved far from where she and I grew up, she came with me. She stands in the garden of any neatly tended bungalow. The gates are painted white, and the brass house number is polished brightly. She's a young mother now. Her cotton dress is like most others in her wardrobe; the pattern fits her well, and floral calico or the occasional gingham is all she needs. Her daughter wraps her arms around her mother's leg, as my friend once did with her mother. The little girl has her dark brown hair, as straight as straight can be, and her dark brown eyes are lit with happy laughter, just like those of my daughter.